The Cowardice of CNN

Since when does being factual require reporting both sides? We don't report that the earth may or may not be flat, or that the stars may or may not be holes in the sky. In this sense, I think the decentralizing tendency of blogs are a boon to journalism. Rather than being completely handcuffed by strict editorial guidelines informed by political and financial concerns, blogs wear their hearts on their sleeves. Though blogs are almost invariably written with an agenda to support, the best blogs include data to back up their assertions, citations to support their logical arguments, and arguments to back their data. Even the most stringently researched and crafted editorial twenty years ago was hamstrung by the limitations of print: graphs cost money to print, citations take up space better used for ads or other articles, and without the other two backing you up it becomes very difficult to effectively prove a point.

At some point journalists, or their editors, or their publishers, decided that actually proving an assertion was far too much trouble to bother with. Newspapers had limited space for a lot of news. Instead, it became more efficient to simply print what someone said under the guise of "editorial balance." This trend was accelerated by the onset of cable news, and the near constant cries of "liberal bias." All of the sudden, reporting on fossils required not only an acknowledgment of intelligent design, but precluded any explanation of why the fossil is as old as it is.

Of course Fox eventually reversed course. Rather than dilute it's editorial slant, it doubled down, plunging itself deep into the realm of the niche market. While still little concerned with facts or truth, it nonetheless traces some of its unvarnished qualities back to the original journalistic tradition. MSNBC soon followed in the opposite direction. That left CNN as the sole bearer of the "balanced" tradition. The network has become so obsessed with reporting "both sides", that it has all but abandoned any pretense to evidence or analysis.

Which brings me back to blogs. Unlike newspapers or cable news networks, blogs are an utterly decentralized institution. Like the pamphleteers of the revolutionary period, anyone can strike a few keys and become the next Matthew Yglesias, provided the content is good enough. And that last part is key. Unlike the old media, blogs still largely lack institutional networks. Never printed, filmed, or otherwise processed, blogs are both cheap to make and cheap to distribute. Furthermore, since they are limited not by time nor word-count, but by the attention spans of their readers, bloggers are able to fill their posts to the brim with supporting evidence for their claims: videos are linked proving what was said, polls are shown proving which trends actually exist, and documents are displayed proving where people were born/worked/stole/etc. . .

This is why, when the old bastards at the Post complain about lax editorial standards or "stolen content" via links and attribution, what they're really worried about is their own extinction. People are easily misled, largely ignorant, and prone to self-deception. Yet at the end of the day, individuals are pretty damn smart. We realize that two opposing viewpoints can't be equally correct. The truth is that more data, more citations, more discussion, more journalism is better for everyone. Ask yourself whether we would have understood how truly inept Sarah Palin is had our only source of news been "balanced reporting" that whitewashed her lack of knowledge in the name of fair treatment. At what point would we have learned the true story behind the terror programs as long as the networks never named it for what it was in fear of "editorializing?"

At some point we have to expect more from the media. This is an old canard, to be sure, but until they break the paradigm of "balance = truth" they will never be the force they were in society again.